Vegan Molasses Cookies

Earlier this summer one of our interns made these delicious cookies that impressed everyone, especially when people found out they were vegan. So when I needed a good vegan recipe to make for my officemate (his daughter is vegan) to thank him for the awesome Redskin tickets he gave me a few weeks ago I thought these would be perfect (so were the seats 47 yard line and 10 rows back definitely the best seats for my first NFL game even if it was preseason)!! As I mentioned before I am a cookie snob but these are delicious and extremely soft, my mom thought they weren't baked all the way but they were!

I of course didn't have all the ingredients, seems to be a common theme lately, and didn't have any ground ginger so I just added some extra cinnamon and they still came out delicious! The vegan and nonvegan ingredients are listed below, I have only eaten the vegan recipe!






MOLASSES COOKIES

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground ginger
3/4 cup butter (for vegan version use equal parts vegan earth balance and coconut oil - I used just 3/4 C. of Vegan Earth Balance)
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg (or a rounded 1/4 cup pumpkin - I used canned pumpkin)

DIRECTIONS:

- Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
- Mix together dry ingredients and set aside.
- Cream together butter and sugar.
- Beat in the molasses and egg/pumpkin.
- Stir in dry ingredients, cover dough and chill several hours (this is totally a crucial step, otherwise the cookies melt all over the baking sheet and don't look cute)
- Take dough by heaping tablespoons and roll into small balls, place on lightly greased baking sheets (I just used my trusty ice cream scoop and didn't grease the baking sheets)
- Bake 7-8 minutes, let cool on sheet 5 min before transferring to cooling rack.